Biotechnology: Tour the Lab

Hi, welcome to the biotechnology department at Alamance Community College. Come on in. Follow me, we're going to the biomanufacturing studio. Welcome to the biomanufacturing. Here we are actually going to run our standard AXA flat bioreactors. We've got a small bioreactor here. This allows us to grow our material, get our proteins out when needed. These proteins can be purified on here. This is an HPLC. This can detect very minute fragments of molecules. It can really detect really small amounts. We use it to purify GFP, but also to look at caffeine. Over here, we've got a smaller brother of the HPLC. This is an FPLC. It's not built up at this moment, but this is basically where we do affinity chromatography and other materials to basically make sure that we can purify before it goes into the HPLC. Then over here, this is our ELISA plate reader. We have the ability to detect fluorescence and luminescence to run a variety of different assays on cells and proteins and other molecules. Over here, our last equipment that we want to show you today, here we've got our big bioreactor. This bioreactor basically mimics the equipment that's in the industry. Here we teach you how to work with big bioreactors used in industry for, for instance, pharmaceutical creation of vaccines and other material.